Against Caesar’s Cost of Glory
A Review of Alex Petkas’s Cost of Glory
In the days leading up to America’s 250th anniversary, we will publish articles addressing issues related to our founding and its enduring importance for the present. We hope this will contribute to honoring our founders and renewing the beliefs and convictions that have animated our republic from its conception.
Worries that the American republic is at the end of the line invite speculation on what the future has in store. Some have speculated that perhaps Caesarism is in our future. Caesarism stands for the proposition that our current republican system, and especially our legislature, either from corruption or factionalism, is no longer up to the task of governing an empire. The more far-flung our empire, the more it depends on energy concentrated in the executive. The more paralyzed our legislature, the more we depend on administrative rules to adapt to circumstances. A man of comprehensive vision—a Caesar— provides the energy and unity to move the empire forward in a time of paralysis.
Mike Anton (my Claremont colleague) predicts that America may get a Caesar –blue or red– in the future. Anton’s prediction is intended as a dispassionate analysis and not the expression of a desire for a Caesar. Whether we like it or not, a Caesar may be in our future.
Others, like Alex Petkas, proprietor of Cost of Glory, predict and even long for a Caesar. The paralysis of republican Rome between 100 and 60 BC resembles, in many ways, America’s current predicament. The Roman Republic was not suited to governing an empire. Corruption was rampant. A public-spirited strongman could set things right. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and that man was Julius Caesar.
Petkas is at his best when using Plutarch and Julius Caesar’s own writings to trace the scope of Caesar’s ambition, his critique of Rome’s decadent political order, his competence as a commander, and his vision for Rome’s civic renewal. However, the glory Petkas assigns to Caesar clouds his judgments about Rome and political life as such.
Julius Caesar understood the Republic’s mortal illness as well as any of his contemporaries. The old senatorial order had devolved into sterile factionalism, where optimates like Cato blocked necessary action, while populares exploited mob resentments. Smooth operators like Crassus, whom Petkas dubs Rome’s “puppet master,” fund the mobs who stir up trouble and the politicos who harness them. Only Cicero, who sought his own glory in parallel to Caesar, shared Caesar’s deep appreciation for the perils Rome faced. Cicero, like Caesar, began his career with a populist critique of the existing order. His career points to a path Caesar refused to take.
By the 60’s BC, Caesar understood that power in Rome had already shifted to great men who could command loyal armies and popular support. Strongmen would rule. The only question was which strongman would wield power wisely and for Rome’s good. With an almost superhuman combination of charm, administrative deftness, and audacity, Caesar seized the moment to overturn the sclerotic Republic. Rome’s new empire could not be governed through tentative, shifting alliances and petty politicians more interested in making sure they got theirs while the getting was good.
Petkas shows how Caesar had to be a strongman to become Rome’s strongman. Becoming the strongman meant destabilizing the Republic and undermining its defenders. While Cicero thought much-needed repairs required the cooperation of Rome’s best men, Caesar came to believe only regime change was adequate.
Consider their approaches to Catiline’s revolt in 63 BC. Cicero had just been elected consul, abandoning his populism to get the high office with the help of the establishment. News of Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic was brought to him in secret. After exposing the plot and securing Catiline’s conviction, the question turned to punishment. Cicero, like the establishment, favored the death penalty. Caesar, sympathetic to Catiline, hardly excused the plot but spoke against execution and in favor of imprisonment and confiscation of property. Cicero had Catiline’s co-conspirators executed, and the man himself chased from the city. Caesar played both sides. Caesar signaled great sympathy to Catiline’s cause through his pleas for mercy, but he did not (yet!) cross the Rubicon. Caesar just made it increasingly difficult for patriotic consuls to defend the Republic. Eventually, Caesar’s allies exiled Cicero for his actions.
Caesar chipped away at the norms that sustained Rome’s republican civilization, while complaining about the weakness of those norms. Initial plotting justified further plotting due to the decrepitude of the regime.
Much the same is true of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. Caesar’s tactics in the Veneti campaign were both impolitic and unjust, as Napoleon said in his commentary on Caesar, violating “the law of nations.” Yet Caesar does what needs doing, while his opponents are always playing late Republic political games. Killing women and children after the mass slaughter of the Usipetes and Tencteri or the sacking of Avaricum led to charges in Rome, charges which Petkas, with his habitual pro-Caesar bent, sees as motivated by Cato’s usual cynicism.
Petkas excuses every Caesar excess. The Germans are fickle and treacherous, so cooperation with them demanded harsh measures. The Gallic threat is unpredictable. The odds were so long that the men can be excused for taking things a bit too far. Caesar let his men give vent to their lust for pillage and vengeance.
Petkas’s apology for Caesar always comes back to the great man’s broad, regime-level diagnosis of what ails Rome. He knew the problems and had the best ideas of what to do. Caesar’s Gallic conquest wasn’t just an empire-building adventure. It took Caesar out of Rome amidst its factional fight and brought him resources, earned him loyalty, and promoted his legend, which positioned him to address Rome’s crisis. Without Gaul, Caesar would have been in no position to challenge the Senate or expose the vacuousness of the republic. Caesar’s political vision justified a million dead Gauls.
At the same time, Petkas downplays Caesar’s revolutionary ambition. Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? For Petkas, Caesar did everything he could to avoid the showdown with the Senate. His allies in Rome, most notably Curio, offered compromise after compromise to allow Caesar to return to Rome without being prosecuted. Every compromise was rejected. What impelled Caesar to bring his armies within the sacred district of Rome? As Petkas argues, “Caesar’s own account [of why he crossed the Rubicon] reveals a man driven not by revolutionary ambition, but by wounded dignity and the desperate need to defend his honor against enemies who would destroy him through partisan prosecution.” Caesar’s dignity moves him to overthrow the Republic, not overweening ambition.
Caesar had this sense of dignity from his youth. When Sulla demanded that he divorce his first wife, Cornelia, Caesar refused. Famously, he would rather be the “first man” in a petty village than the second man in Rome. When Caesar readied to cross the Rubicon, he “urged his troops to defend his reputation and dignitas against his enemies” (Civil War 9.7). A man who is moved to overthrow a government to protect his reputation may actually have earned a bad reputation. At the very least, Rome had always made space for many men concerned with their reputations and dignitas. Caesar’s understanding of his own dignitas would ultimately displace the battle for honors that propelled Rome to the world’s greatest empire.
This leads Petkas to his most audacious claims about Caesar. Only Caesar had the breadth of vision to renew the world. He deserved to rule Rome, alone, with hand-picked, dependent subordinates. It was lonely and dangerous on top, but it is where the lion and eagle belong. Caesar transcended the old elite’s logjam by destroying the old order. In the future, governors would be sent to the provinces who had personal loyalty to Caesar, instead of corrupt oligarchs out to bilk the natives. He revised the calendar, promoted debt relief through partial remissions, conducted land reform and distribution to veterans. He founded new colonies, imagined public works, as Plutarch tells us, including a canal across the isthmus of Corinth and a diversion of the Tiber River. Caesar’s was a vision of national greatness to replace the blinkered, self-serving oligarchy.
Caesar even imagined he was a god and planned a temple for himself. For some, the fact that Caesar welcomed divine honors and godlike status was evidence of his tyrannical ambition. This stands in contrast to America’s revolutionaries, who viewed Caesar’s tyranny as antagonistic to true liberty. Patrick Henry, as the conflict over the Stamp Act intensified, said, “Caesar has his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George III may profit by their example.” In 1771, John Adams wrote, “Caesar, by destroying the Roman Republic, made himself perpetual dictator.”
For Petkas, Caesar tolerated and even encouraged godlike worship from citizens as a necessity to binding the diverse, fissiparous empire together. Being a god was a tool of statesmanship to leave a legacy, not a tyrannical delusion.
Many respectable Romans viewed the claims to divinity with hostility. The Ides of March brought an end to Caesar’s godlike aspirations. Petkas sees Caesar’s assassination not as deserved comeuppance of a tyrant but as the shortsighted revenge of men who could not match Caesar’s breadth of vision. Thus, Caesar diagnosed the disease, supplied strong medicine, and paid the price from small-minded men—leaving a transformed Rome that outlived the Republic’s corpse.
Few things could be as un-American as Petkas’s forgiving, excusing treatment of Caesar. To fuel the ambition of men today, Petkas forgets the nature of political life. Political life is ultimately a competition for honors. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” as James Madison writes in Federalist 51. Caesar’s tyrannical aim to extinguish that competition for honors—and to make honor-loving men subordinate to a single, all-competent godlike man such as Caesar—is itself a most unstable solution to the problem of a decadent regime.
The forgiving approach to Caesar reflects a typically Eastern Orthodox approach to politics, where trust in a tsar springs from the soil. Let us encourage broad and deep thinking about our situation. Let us inspire men with actions and analysis of great men of the past, in the spirit of Plutarch. But, also, let us distinguish tyrannical ambition from the well-ordered ambition fit for a republican people.
Caesar’s solution to the problem of Rome ultimately ran afoul of the even deeper problem of honor. As we celebrate America’s 250, fueling ambition to reform our decaying system—an ambition not unlike Cicero’s—is the only way forward. Perhaps Petkas hopes to cultivate such ambition across the board, but doing so through the glorification of Caesar, as Petkas does, gives ambition a bad name.